Issues

Nadi Edwards teaches in the Department of Literatures in English at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies.

Curdella Forbes is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Howard University. She has published journal articles on Caribbean literature, Caribbean literary theory and Shakespeare, and is the author of the study, From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender (2005). She has also published three works of fiction, Songs of Silence (2002); Flying with Icarus (2003); A Permanent Freedom (2008, forthcoming).

Mindie Lazarus-Black is Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, at University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda (1994) and Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation (2007). She is currently at work on a new project on the internationalization of legal education and the profession.

Shirley Toland-Dix is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where she teaches courses in Caribbean literature and African American literature. She is the author of several articles on Caribbean and African American novelists. The recipient of a McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship, she is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Disenchanting the Discourse: Caribbean Women Novelists and the Representation of History.

Corinna McLeod is an Assistant Professor of English at Grand Valley State University. Her research focuses on postcolonial literatures and the development of national identity.

Michael O. West teaches in the departments of Sociology and Africana Studies at Binghamton University. He has published variously on southern Africa, the construction of African Studies, and the African diaspora.

Ian Gregory Strachan teaches English at The College of The Bahamas. He is the author of the novel, God's Angry Babies (1997) and of the scholarly work,Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (2002). His poetry has been published in The Caribbean Writer and Poui and is included in New Caribbean Poetry (2007). His play No Seeds in Babylon is included in Contemporary Drama from the Caribbean (2001). He founded the Track Road Theatre Company in 1996 and was its Director until 2007. His documentary film Show Me Your Motion was featured in UNESCO's Caribbean Traveling Film Showcase in 2007.

Simone Leigh is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Rush Arts gallery, Momenta Art, The Painted Bride, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and The Chicago Cultural Center. She has been awarded residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, School of Visual Arts, Henry Street Settlement, Greenwich House Pottery and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Her work has been reviewed widely including pieces in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Trace Magazine, Artnet, NY 1 News, New York Blade, and Flavorpill.

Oneika Russell received her diploma in painting from Edna Manley College, Jamaica, in 2003, and MA in Interactive Media from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2004. She has worked in the Education Department at the National Gallery of Jamaica and as a media art lecturer at Edna Manley College, and currently edits and contributes to ART: Jamaica, a blog for contemporary Jamaican art [http://www.artjamaica.blogspot.com]. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in exhibitions such as The National Gallery's Curator's Eye II and the National Biennial. Her work has been screened internationally at video art events such as Manifest Art & Design on Film Series. She is the recipient of a 2007 Commonwealth Arts & Crafts Award.

Leon Wainwright is Lecturer in History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Third Text. During 2004–2005 he conducted fieldwork on visual and material culture in Trinidad and Guyana, with support from The Leverhulme Trust and the University of Sussex. His forthcoming monograph focuses on an assembled community of artists in contemporary Britain.

Beth Fowkes Tobin is Professor of English at Arizona State University where she teaches eighteenth-century British literature, critical theory, and cultural studies. Before moving to Arizona in 2001, she taught at the University of Hawaii. Her interests include the visual and material culture of empire and the cultural history of natural history. She is the author of Colonizing Nature: the Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1820 (2005) and Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (1999) as well as articles on the tropics, slaves' gardens, and botanical illustration.

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University and, since 2007, the editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. He is the author of Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Jacob Lawrence (1992), Black Art: A Cultural History (2002), and the forthcoming Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008). He has also helped organize several major art exhibitions, including most recently: Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott; Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary; and Conjuring Bearden.

Krista A. Thompson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and an independent curator. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (2006). She has published in American Art, Small Axe, and The Drama Review. She is currently working on a book manuscript and documentary on visual culture and black youth in the northern Caribbean and southern United States that investigates the intersections between vernacular forms of photography, performance, and contemporary art.